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Until recently, Google allowed parents to control their children’s access to the internet with its Supervised Users program for the Chrome browser and Family Link for Android devices. A few days ago, Google effectively shut down the Supervised Users program leaving significant holes in its parental control options.

The Supervised Users program that launched in 2013 allowed parents to limit what their children could do with the Chrome browser by enabling SafeSearch, blocking websites, and letting them see a list of the websites their children visited. Google began shutting the Supervised Users program down on January 12th when it no longer allowed parents to add new users to the program. Then on January 15th, parents lost the ability to modify restrictions for user profiles created before January 12th. Supervised Users is still in place, but parental control has been effectively disabled.

Google’s replacement for the Supervised Users program is a new set of parental control features for the Chrome operating system which will launch “later this year”. Google also suggests parents turn to its Family Link program which sets up parent-controlled Google accounts for children on Android devices.

Google’s suggested replacements for the Supervised Users program are all well and good, but they reduce parents’ ability to control their children’s internet access. “Late this year” isn’t now, and however effective Google’s new set of control features may turn out to be, they’re useless for parents who want to change the control parameters for their children’s internet use today.

Family Link is a well-designed parental control solution, but it has important limitations. First, parents can only set up Family Link accounts for children under the age of 13. This leaves parents who want to control internet access for teenagers out in the cold until “later this year”.

A second limitation is that Family Link only works on Android devices. Parents who allow their children to use desktops or laptops to do school work at home have lost the ability to control what their children can access on the internet.

Finally, Family Link is only available in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the US. Parents in the rest of the world now have no way to control their children’s internet access through the Chrome browser. That’s a lot of parents as Chrome dominates the browser market with over 60% market share in both mobile and desktop/laptop as of last month according to Netmarketshare.

Now that Supervised Users been shut down, I can't block this website.

Google did an excellent job with Family Link which leads you to think their new set of parental controls for Chrome will also be first-rate. However, unless “later this year” turns out to be later this month, shutting down the Supervised Users program before the new system was ready to go has significantly limited the ability of parents to control their children’s access to the internet.

I’m a cognitive scientist, retired professor, musician, gamer, and avid cyclist with a B.A in History, an M.S. in History and Philosophy of Science, and a Ph.D. in

…

I’m a cognitive scientist, retired professor, musician, gamer, and avid cyclist with a B.A in History, an M.S. in History and Philosophy of Science, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. In addition to papers in professional scientific journals, I’ve written the book Nutrition for Cyclists: Eating and Drinking Before, During and After the Ride, articles for Ars Technica, Priceonomics, Psychology Today and Massively, and the blogs The Info Monkey and Tuned In To Cycling. Parametric Monkey, my musical identity, can be streamed on Spotify, Google Play Music, YouTube and others. You can find me at The Info Monkey on Facebook, @TheInfoMonkey on Twitter and contact me at murnane.kevin@gmail.com.